Unknown (135 page)

“Spoil it for you, or for her, do you mean?” asked Mary, wondering a little, in her own mind, exactly why she was pressing their old friend so hard. “But he used to live so miserably,” she thought, “so squalidly and miserably.”

“For both of us!” murmured Tom. “You don't want any more toast, do you, if he's not going to have any? For both of us! I might feel caught; and she might get—oh, I don't know— heavy and domestic, and stop laughing and all that!”

“She isn't so very thin, now, Tom, is she?”

“Shut up, Mary! You know what I mean—you know how girls are when they've got settled—I couldn't bear it for Toss to change a single bit!”

“She won't change, Tom. She won't change. Fd be ready to bear all your reproaches, old friend, if she did; so well do I know that she ivon't. And I don't think . . . very much * . . that you will, either,” she added archly; smiling down at him with her hand on the toast she was buttering.

John turned his face away from this scene at the fire between his wife and their friend. He was not at all sure, at the bottom of his mind, that he wanted Tossie and Tom established in the same house.

“What a demon I am,” he thought. “I love old Tom wThen I've got him to myself; but these mixings up—good Lord!”

“How do you feel now?” enquired Mary, turning to him when she and Tom wTere seated at the table. He refused to meet her eyes. “I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil!” he muttered, without a thought of Barnaby Rudge's raven.

“Don't keep bothering, Mary,” he groaned peevishly. “You know what's the matter with me and so does Tom.”

“You're not getting jealous, are you, old chap, because I've got your place?” chuckled Barter.

Mary thought to herself: “How dangerously these men fool each other! Doesn't he know that when he says a thing like that, he makes John hate him so much that he could strike him dead?”

“I hope you realise, John,” she said, “that nothing will induce me to let you go to that thing this morning? You've got nervous prostration—that's what's the matter with you; and you're going to stay in bed.”

“So that Tom can take you to the Hill, I suppose? I thought something like that was in your mind.”

Mary said to herself, “I must be more careful. Oh, these men, these men! Our jealousies are serious or nothing. But with them------” She had already come to the conclusion that under a certain “cannikin-clink” brusqueness, like that of Iago, her husband concealed black holes of malice that went down to the nether pit.

This judgment was not quite accurate. John's fits of “miching-mallecho” came and went, like the weather. Often when she thought he was most affectionate, his heart had turned as cold as ice; and again, when she fancied she detected abysses of malicious aloofness, he was merely worrying because he was afraid he was going to have dyspepsia.

“If you can't go,” she said emphatically, “/ shan't go. Tom can take Tossie and leave the babies with us here. Why don't you do that, Tom? Toss would love to see the crowds and hear the speeches.”

Barter admitted that so far they had been unable to find anyone to leave the twins with. All Glastonbury seemed resolved to be at Chalice Hill this morning.

They finished their meal in silence, John's feverish querulous-ness exercising a discouraging effect upon them.

“Do you want me to come over with you, Tom, and get the twins?” she asked, as soon as they were done. “It's after ten, and you and Tossie should be starting if you want to get good places,”

As soon as Barter and Mary had departed on this errand, John Crow struggled up from his bed and somewhat stiffly and weakly stood erect upon the floor—Yes, he felt pretty wretched; but it tickled his vagabond fancy to trick the two people he loved best in the world; and he set himself obstinately to put on his clothes. When he was dressed, and had his overcoat on, he went to the sink and sponged his face with cold water. This made him feel a little better; and moving to the table, he filled Mary's tea-cup with milk and poured it down his throat.

“Nervous prostration,” he said to himself, “what a phrase that is! Well, I certainly have done something for old Geard and his Saxon arch; and I'm damned if they're going to keep me from seeing the sport.”

Half an hour later he had succeeded by the exercise of both blandishments and violence in pushing his way through the surging crowd, which already filled the road and spread up the slope of the hill, till he was standing right against the new arch itself.

It was a fine piece of work, this Saxon arch, now it rose uncovered to the watery sunshine of that January day, but little as John knew about architecture he felt sure that the great architect had fooled Mr. GearcL and that this massive stone edifice was a completely new and original work, no mure Saxon than Cardiff Villa was Saxon. But it was a noble erection; and John had an inkling that in some very subtle way the architect had actually caught something of the spirit of Mr. Geard's new religion!

It was not easy to define to himself what he felt; but he did feel that if he, John Crow, had had to express in solid stone what he had come to understand of the Mayor's strange notions, it would have been almost exactly in this way that he would have done it. How queer that crowd of human heads looked, as it swayed and undulated beneath him! A line from Homer's description of the pallid ghosts, flocking up from Erebus, came into his mind—“The powerless heads of the dead.”

He still felt curiously dizzy and feverish; so much so that between himself and that vast undulating crowd—and how silent and patient they were! They only swayed and moved and eddied and drifted. They really ivere like ghosts from Erebus! Why were they all so spellbound?—Yes, between him and them there seemed to be a cold, grey, clammy, Cimmerian mist.

On the opposite side of the arch from where he was standing, and he was himself inside some sort of rope-barrier—how had he crossed that barrier? He could remember nothing just now—was a broad, empty platform, covered entirely with a heavy black cloth, “God! it looks like a place of execution,” he thought; and then it came over him that it was towards this draped platform, though there was no one there, that this vast concourse of people were lifting their hushed, awe-struck, hypnotised heads—the “powerless heads of the dead.”

And John began to receive a most uncanny feeling—the feeling namely that Mr. Geard really was standing on that platform now. Either his own brain was too dizzy to see him there, when everybody else saw him, or there was an actual invisible presence up there which everybody in the crowd felt without seeing anything.

But it certainly was, for John, the most extraordinary experience he had ever had, that swaying, shifting, drifting, undulating crowd—men, women, and children, young men and young maids, foreigners and natives—all lifting up strained, tense, hushed, white faces, as they surged slowly about, while their vast mass moved, like a sea-flood stirred by tides that could not be seen, here and there about the ribs of the hill. *

Feeling too dizzy to stand much longer upon his feet, and yet unwilling to sink down upon the grass, John began examining the great unhewn rock-boulders out of which the architect had constructed this singular monument. While he did this he began to experience the feeling that he was really entirely alone on this hillside, and at any moment this illusion, the mirage of these faces, might melt away. He was aroused from this sensation by a sudden spasm of recognition. Where had he seen this particular type of stone before? The stone was inserted between two blocks of Portland stone—for among the architect's original effects in the Saxon arch was the use of several varieties of material—and as John now leaned his forehead against it, for it was on a level with his face and he had come hatless from Northload Street, he knew well where he had seen its like before. It resembled one of those strange “foreign stones,” which Mr. Evans assured him came from South Wales, which he had seen at Stonehenge.

The contact of his skull with this stone—and it is likely enough it would have happened with any stone of a similar texture—put new strength into him and cleared the mists from his brain. He now discovered that he was not by any means alone in this roped-off enclosure. There was in fact quite a large group of people assembled here, though in his dizziness, and his preoccupation with the vast array of faces upraised from the slope below, he had felt as if he were the only person close to the arch.

“It's like the ones at Stonehenge,” he remarked to his nearest neighbour, who turned out to be the beautiful wife of Harry Stickles, the chemist. Nancy had indeed traded shamelessly on her unusual good looks to get inside this privileged barrier, and it was only because all the officials were local people that she had attained her desire.

“Where is he now?” she responded to John's remark about the stone.

“Where is who?”

“He; Mr. Geard.”

“I don't know,” said John. “To tell you the truth, Mrs. Stickles, i feel as if he were standing on that platform now! I seem to feel him there . . . but of course it's empty/5 He ran his fingers over the stone that interested him so much* ”It's like the ones at Stonehenge," he repeated aloud.

“There must be more sacred stones,” said Nancy, “in Glastonbury than anywhere else in England. I heard people talking just now about a stone with funny marks on it that's been found quite lately on this Hill.”

“So they've got it, have they?” he said. “It must be the one that this new antiquary was after, not the King Edgar Chapel man, but this new fellow who's been about here—but Mr. Geard never told me about this stone.”

“That's just what they were saying about the other one with the marks on it,” said Nancy. “They were saying he hides these stones where no one can find them.”

“Only when he thinks they've got something to do with Merlin!” said John. “He knows nothing really about the Legend. He's never read a word of Malory. It's old Evans who's put all this Merlin business into his head.”

“He's a very great man,” said Nancy gravely.

“I never said he wasn't!” responded John. “They'll be making a legend out of him soon. Geard of Glastonbury—it sounds like history already!”

They both were silent; and John, with his fingers still pressed against that South Wales stone, began to feel again the strange sensation of being quite alone up here under Geard's arch and by the side of Geard's black-draped platform. The touch of this foreign stone seemed to isolate him, along with all the Glastonbury stones. It gave him the power to feel the life of Glastonbury with all its long historic centuries as if it were the mere motions of beetles and earth-worms across the surface of a platform of primordial rock, the rock of the Island of Avalon. That vast crowd of white upturned faces, that were like ghosts from Erebus, seemed to become real ghosts, the ghosts of all the men and women whose little, turbulent earth-lives had disturbed the planetary repose of this rock island in the tide-swept marshes. Yes! He felt them rise up multitudinously about him, kluta ethnea nekron, “the glorious tribes of the dead,” and he, the wornout Danish adventurer, privileged by a strange fate to be the one to feel them there, with Geard's arch above him and Geard's platform beside him.

He glanced up from that sea of pallid faces to the coping-stone of the arch which had been rudely carved into a rough resemblance of Dunstan of Baltonsborough. Baltonsborough itself was over there, hidden by the Tor, an abode of living people still, and nearer him, beyond Edgarley, was Havyatt Gap, where his own un superstitious Danes had been stopped by these mad monks. Mad they were then; mad they were still; and old Geard was the maddest of them all!

This stone, all these stones, how much nobler was their long-enduring life than the follies and fevers of men! Surrounded by the great waters had they once been, by the tossing salt waves of that free sea, over which the Viking ships had swept. Would that some strong new flood might come up from its ocean-bed, and sweep over all these morbid-legended fields! How he hated them, these lies, these frauds, these illusions, which he had been paid to propagate! And yet there was something about old Geard, that seemed as much on his side as on the side of these mad monks. Was Geard himself, secretly in his deep heart, as heathen as he was? Was that black-draped empty platform only waiting even now, for the lifting of some huge gonfalon of defiance to all this? Was this opening of the man's Saxon arch into these Latin-Celtic mysteries of Glastonbury, in reality a reversal of that stopping of the Danes at Havyatt?

How well he remembered his own first entrance into the town, more than ten months ago, in Mr. Evans' little motor car. Well! Evans and he were both married men now; married and settled, and far away from Stonehenge!

“I can't think where he is!” It was the beautiful Nancy addressing him again.

“How do / know,” John replied peevishly. “He's probably asleep in Wookey Hole, like he was last time, when Cousin Philip shoved himself into his place. Why! Talk of the devil— if there's not Philip himself, coming over here now!”

Nancy turned round and sure enough there was Philip Crow, pushing through the crowd that gave way before him, and making straight for the platform.

Behind him, as he came, rose a low angry murmur from the natives present. They were evidently already expectant of a second grand anti-climax.

Philip skirted the platform steps, evidently surprised to see no sign of Geard, and passing—a thing no one else had dared to do—right under the arch, came up to Nancy and John.

John held out his hand. They had not met many times since that day at Northwold Rectory.

“Come to address us in place of the Mayor?” said John, his cheek twitching with the family twitch and his eyelids blinking under the grip that Philip gave his fingers.

“Perhaps ... it will . . . fall on me,” responded Philip with an air of contemptuous nonchalance. “I'm ready for the job . . . if Lord P. and our good Vicar are dodging it! Has the Mayor got no one to introduce him? How oddly all these things are arranged!”

“Do you know Mrs. Nancy Stickles, Philip?”

Philip took off his hat and bowed. “It's just like the scamp,” he thought, “to saddle me with some pretty pick-up at a moment like this.”